After sobbing over my most recent natural gas and electric utility bills...I decided to start this thread about viable alternative energy...so....my first example...

Ocean Water..check it out!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.html

Fusion Power!

ITER
http://www.iter.org/index.htm

Great ideas and i'm all for them, but unfortunately their development will probably be after we are so old we simply will not care any more.

I believe to see benefits we must seriously look at hydrogen. A home hydrogen generator to power your electric generator, heat your house.
I am looking into finding units capable of producing enough hydrogen per minute to do this.

Please post here what you find out, SD.

Everything is going up but the living wage is not keeping pace. Less money spent on bills means more money to live on. Not only that...the damage to the environment is incalculable in my opinion. I'm thinking of investing in solar power this summer. And my next vehicle will definitely be a hybrid.

I took a risk and ordered a kit for my Ford Aspire. It will make it into a hydrogen hybrid.
If it works as they say it will get me a minimum of 50% or better gas mileage.
It is suppose to arrive in mid May. As soon as I can confirm that it works...or not, I'll post it.

garbage power

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18328/?a=f
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007...prophet-garbage

Hopefully then this would also mean an end to having to sort your recylcing, if everything may be dissociated into its constituent molecules and synthesized (i.e. recycled). You can just throw all waste out together. However, I do not believe the claims of energy efficiency. This might be a stupid question but how is it that you are able to create a fuel molecule and then gain more than six times the energy back when it is combusted? Where does the energy come from?

Where does the hydrogen come from?

In Australia there are a lot of people recycling cooking oil from fast food outlets and refining there own diesel. It is very cost effective. As far as I understand it refines a little thick so an electric bar heater is put in the tank to warm it initially. Some have dual tanks, one with some pump diesle to get the vehicle started then they switch over to the other tank. It is funny, when one drives past, it smells like a fish and chips shop
I think there is many ways to approach making biodiesel, here is a link or two.

http://www.biodiesel.org.au/
http://www.tasmanenergy.com.au/biodiesel.htm

Also Wind and solar power are pretty big here in some parts of OZ, I know of a few houses close by running very effectively on this.

This post has been edited by Dundee: Apr 17 2008, 05:53 AM